I recently switched over from using Columns UI to the better combination of Default UI + Facets & SimPlaylist - really an eye opening improvement in almost every way. There are just a few things in the looks department preventing absolute perfection, so thought I'd mention some ideas I'd like to see, however unlikely they might be.

Firstly, a picture to illustrate. (Left: The current look with Aero. Right: A mock-up to spot the difference) -

1) Option to remove the 1px grey edge borders from elements -

Tabs are traditionally supposed to blend in with their contents, but these are thwarted by the 1px border around every element. Columns UI (and some other components) have an option for "Edge Style: None", and I would dearly love to see the same for all Default UI elements. I think it would help the entire layouts to look cleaner. (Not sure how annoying it would be to implement, though - is it possible?)

(I realize the screenshot is showing Facets & SimPlaylist, but the same applies to default Album List and other elements, etc. I put the suggestion to the Facets guy as well, but then realized the idea would be for naught unless foobar itself had the same option for consistency).

2) Option to set toolbar background color/image -

We have the Customize Toolbar Button preferences already - I wonder if a check box could be added there to choose a custom toolbar background color, for both the toolbar and command menus? Win7 uses the above strange pale blue/purple by default, and the only way to change it is to hack the DLLs to apply a different visual style. And I know this is more a Microsoft issue, but even so, I'd love to be able to make the toolbar match the rest of the layout so easily - seeing you can customize practically everything else, it seems natural. (Again, not sure how possible it would be).

Lastly just a couple minor things that caught my eye...

3) Add 2px padding to the Tabs element -

As in the picture above, the top of the (non-Playlist) Tabs element meshes with the Toolbar, making a thicker and less appealing grey line. Meanwhile the top of the Playlist Tabs have some padding and look better for it. I wonder if you could give the top most Tab sets the same amount of top padding to their background, say 2px. (See right picture above)

4) Add a space to the Statusbar volume text -

As this appears to be hard-coded, perhaps simply adding a space before the "dB" for consistency with the output from %replaygain_track_gain% and %replaygain_album_gain% tags?

Thanks for your time. I know these are obviously minor requests in the grand scheme of foobar2000, but I figure, what the heck. This program is such a great way to organize and listen to music, and gives me much enjoyment every single day, so cheers for that.

> O.P. - I recently switched over from using Columns UI to the better combination of Default UI + Facets & SimPlaylist - really an eye opening improvement in almost every way. . .

I've been using CUI for ever and played with countless preferences, tweaks and layouts. A few months ago I decided to play with a DUI layout.

The display of text and fonts in DUI has never matched the look I get in CUI which is razor sharp and highly readable; I always get an impression of slight blur when looking at text in DUI.

Facets (DUI component) and the CUI built-in Filters do the exact same thing as each other except that Facets also offers you a filter/search toolbar . . . personally I prefer to use a popup foobar2000 built-in "Media Library Search" window and a custom edited copy of "Query Syntax help.html"; I have added a new table in this document which is a list of my favorite search queries . . . for me, the whole point of forcing myself to constantly open this document is to get constantly better at understanding and using the query syntax; thus i find the Facets toolbar a superfluous thing which dumbs down the long-term user experience and negates deep understanding of foobar2000's built-in tools . . . . . . . An annoying thing about the Facets toolbar is you cannot completely hide it even if you remove all checkmarks from the options; it leaves behind a blank toolbar space; the Columns UI Filters don't have such an aesthetic problem. . . . . . . Another annoying feature of Facets is that in the Filters view, any text enclosed in brackets is dimmed, even if you don't want this.

SimPlayist (DUI component) is what I initially started my DUI layout with . . . . however, after more playing around I soon came to realize that EsPlaylist surpasses it in every possible sense; to be honest, I have no idea why SimPlayist needed to come into existence . . . . . One annoying feature of SimPlaylist is that it dims any text enclosed in brackets, even if you don't want this . . . . . . Another annoying thing about SimPlaylist is it gives you NO OPTION to have a horizontal scrollbar, it force-locks right alignment of the last column, and dragging column headers to change widths is a pain in the ass. . . . . . . the CUI playlist viewer ("NG Playlist") is better on all counts except for one fact; it does not allow multiple lines for grouping.

And color preferences . . . . unlimited ways to specify colors for items in CUI is just fantastic; DUI does not give you any such thing.

3rd party developers can use the same edge styles as columns UI components if they want. i use a few in DUI already (ESplaylist and WSH panel mod) and there are probably more that i'm unaware of. i think it's highly unlikely the default panels will ever get this option but you never know.

whilst on the subject of trivial appearance thingies: aero for album list please. i vaguely remembering posting about that when foobar hit v1 but nothing has happened.